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“How strange is that?” muses the director, who has long been friends with Gyllenhaal’s TV director father and screenwriter mother. “Jake could very happily drop 20 feet down a rope quickly and go straight into battle at the other end.”Newell speaks fondly of his leading man, but then he’s known him since he was 10 years old. “You’d put a safety harness on Jake and he’d do one of the big jumps,” Newell says about the 29-year-old Oscar-nominated actor (“Brokeback Mountain”) who also trained with one of Spain’s top equestrians near Madrid to master horseback riding for his princely role. For the big-screen version, Bruckheimer even brought in the Paris-based inventor of parkour, David Belle, to coach Gyllenhaal and stuntmen. “Prince of Persia” is based on the hit video game, in which the agile title character clambers up walls and leaps from rooftop to rooftop, moves based on the acrobatic art of parkour. And it’s not like the outfits are done when they’re done - newly fashioned leather goods, such as the strappy warrior garb worn by the prince, had to be thrown into cement mixers with stones to give them a sixth-century look. Gyllenhaal, as Prince Dastan, doesn’t wear a heck of a lot, but a staggering 7,000 costumes were created for the movie, most from scratch and from fabric gleaned around the globe. “Prince of Persia” is produced by showy blockbuster king Jerry Bruckheimer, and that explains all the meticulous whoop-tee-do that went into turning out the summer tentpole. “We had a lot of crime scene tape up, which meant people were not allowed to walk on the bits of sand that we were going to shoot because that of course would have been catastrophic.”
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The last day of shooting in Morocco took place at the mammoth Merzouga Sand Dunes. Sharp talons weren’t the only feet the filmmaker fretted about. “They have these claws on their feet, and it’s absolutely true, they will disembowel you if you get in the wrong place.” What they said was, ‘Whatever you do, keep out of the way of the ostriches,’ ” Newell recalls with a devilish chuckle. “We had these wonderful Texas trainers who actually wore 10-gallon straw hats and talked with that twang. Two ostrich wranglers kept the flock in check and rattled nerves of Gyllenhaal and others when they repeatedly warned about the dangers of the unpredictable creatures.
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#PRINCE OF PERSIA MOVIE CASTS PROFESSIONAL#
It may streak by on screen, but just know that professional Moroccan horse jockeys trained for weeks so they could ride the world’s largest birds, which can sprint up to 45 miles per hour. (At least Newell didn’t have to wear goggles when he helmed the hocus-pocus fantasy “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” the gritty mob movie “Donnie Brasco” or the charming dramedy “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”)įor “Prince of Persia,” the Cambridge-educated Newell also spent days “directing” 14 ornery ostriches for a wild medieval racing sequence. During filming of “Prince of Persia” - which boasts a cast and crew of nearly 1,400, including Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina and 800 local Moroccans - the versatile veteran British director and company battled brain-frying 130-degree heat, flash floods and blinding sandstorms. The way the lively 68-year-old Newell tells it, making the mega-budget Disney epic adventure was an insanely involved epic adventure in itself. In the gruesome scene where one is sliced open, Newell says that on set he used a bicycle inner tube for the snake and chopped tuna for its guts). (Despite his haul, those scary vipers in “Prince of Persia” are computer generated images. The creepy crawler-catcher wore a T-shirt emblazoned “Snake Dude” as he collected Hollywood-unfriendly poisonous critters in glass jars before the day’s shoot and between takes. “His name was Snake Dude,” director Mike Newell says with genuine admiration. Or the happy-go-lucky Moroccan man whose daily job was to clear the expansive desert set of venomous scorpions and snakes. Try being the ostrich trainers who kept the hefty, temperamental, feathered actors from ripping out Gyllenhaal’s heart. and Jerry Bruckheimer Inc.)įrom left, Alfred Molina, Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton trudge through a dusty desert scene.Ĭhisel-chested Jake Gyllenhaal may look macho as the sword-fighting hero of “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” but he’s a wimp compared with some gutsy folks who worked behind the scenes when the film was shot in Morocco. Hassansin Whip Man (Thomas DuPont, left) battles sword-fighting hero Prince Dastan (Jake Gyllenhaal) in “Prince of Persia.”ĭirector Mike Newell (center) on the Moroccan set for “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.” (Andrew Cooper / Disney Enterprises Inc. Review: `Prince of Persia' slips from memory (May 26, 2010).